Our remote tape library has been malfunctioning for the past few months, and our remote location just managed to ship the library down. Powering it up on the bench, I got the wonderfully informative “L:H/W Inoperable Servo Error”. Okay…

So, after a reset, and it still doing that, I figured the next step is to open it up. After removing all 11 screws, removing the lid, and powering it on, I noticed that the carousel wasn’t aligned correctly with the tape drive.

So, I hand rotated the carousel around so the “hole” in the carousel’s metal ring (while off), and fired it back up. Lo-and-behold, it went through it’s initialization process and scanned all the tapes, and works fine.

Guessing it was in the middle of an indexing or something and lost power, but in such a way that it didn’t re-initialize when it came back up. =/

Either way, works now.

So, if you have this issue, remove all the screws (3 on each side, 2 in the back top, and 5 on the top), open the top up, and rotate the carousel around until the hole lines up with the sensor (you’ll see where the hole passes by the sensor). The carousel only rotates one direction by hand… so if you miss it, rotate it back around. Then power it on. It should fire up just fine.